Abe Lincoln, Facebook, Twitter and teaching history

Update 1/4/2011 – I posted some new Facebook online creation tools and Facebook templates on a recent Tip of the Week. Find it here.

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I’ve been wanting to get this screen shot of Lincoln’s facebook page off of my desktop for a while and you’re looking for a fun way to suck kids into talking about historical people. I think we can help each other.

Not sure who first came up with the Lincoln Facebook page but it’s been floating around for a while. But if you look closely, you’ll see that who ever it was put some real work into it. (Do you know who Jack Armstrong is?)

And it got me thinking . . . could I use this with middle school and high school kids? I like how we can learn about Lincoln from his Facebook page through a variety of different perspectives, media and voices. Couldn’t we use this format to create some sort of research project or assessment?

A few ideas:

The teacher acts as the historical (Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, D-Day paratrooper, Henry VIII) or fictional (Johnny Tremain, Pink & Say, Hawkeye) character and posts comments, photos, speeches, quotes and status updates. Kids interact with the page in much the same way they would on an actual page.

Ask your student to create a Facebook page instead of the traditional book report.

Students create their own Facebook pages based on research that you assign. This could be a specific person or even non-human kinds of things such as a country, region, event or place. Students would then respond to each others’ pages.

Possible problems?

No access at school. Parent concerns about social networking.

The work- around?

Create an offline template. Not the best but a nice solution that lets you get the same Facebook feel. Kids could do some simple research and complete different pieces of the template, exchange papers and add to one another’s work. This could include fictional and actual links, photos, quotes, friends, flame wars and possible groups.

How did you get this blank template? Is it modifiable? I would love to use it for a getting to know the student activity for Grade 7 and 8 students but would like to change some aspects of your template.

You can just save any Facebook profile page as PDF, then use Photoshop tools to white out any of the specific data – leaving just headers and blank spaces. It would work the same way if you wanted to use the Friends or Home page of Facebook. There’s probably a better way out there but I was able to do it pretty quickly. But I haven’t really ever tried to modify it. I suppose you could put in your own text boxes using Photoshop if you want to put in “non-Facebook” headers.

I like the idea of the template and am going to play around with it. I wish there was a “school” facebook, like teachertube, where we could create these characters online. I’d rather my students become the characters in the civil war and “friend” each other and comment. Wouldn’t it be fun to recreate the dialog between Lincoln and Grant, Meade, or Davis and Lee, or recreate Lincoln and Douglass debates. I’d like to see it “live” and evolve. Shouldn’t this be coming? It would be fun to work with other schools and have hundreds of characters and students involved….. any suggestions on how to make that happen?
Thanks for the template…
Carol Ferguson, PhD
Northfield Middle School, Northfield, NJ

Facebook did allow that sort of thing 2-3 years ago, they’ve since stopped letting “fake” sites stay online long. You might try a site called Edmoto.com. It’s a social networking site for educators – haven’t played a lot with it much. teachers set up controlled networks, you should be able to create “fake” students named Lincoln and Douglas. Mmm . . . will need to play with that a bit.

For the past two or three years I have done this in my high school art history class (when studying the Egyptian culture). Each student selects an interesting person from that culture and creates a page. They post to their own FB page and others. I love this idea. There is a teacher oriented program out there called gaggle net. Our school tried it. When we used it –some aspects were good, but over all I wanted something that was designed differently.

Hi, my name is Priscila and I’m History teacher in Brazil. I have had this same idea two year ago when i was teaching about Iluminism, but we didn’t have internet at school. So, i’ve done a “print screen” in orkut layout and i gave some copies to my students. They loved! It works very well =)

I have often thought about doing a facebook page for historical figures but was just unsure how to get started. Thanks for the information and beginner template. I also enjoyed the helpful hints in the comments. My students already have edmodo accounts and it should be easy to just change their usernames to represent their new character. I cannot wait to get started with my upcoming Civil War Unit and integrating this into a new lesson.

Love this idea. I am a new tech integrator and just found this page. I will have to share this with my fellow teachers.

Have you seen Meograph? It’s another new tool that is perfect for SS. It’s like Google Maps merged with VoiceThread. I am hoping to use it with a student who needs alternative tech for SS curriculum. It doesn’t work on IE, but does work on Chrome or FF.

This past fall I had my students create twitter pages for different delegates at the Constitutional Convention. They had to tweet as if they were at the Convention and I really think it helped them learn about some of the Founding Fathers, as well as the issues debated. Plus, they seemed to like it!

Like the idea of using current social media tools to recreate past conversations! It’s one more tool that you can use to engage kids emotionally with the content.

You might be interested in a new tool I just read about. It recreates text messages withe ability to save, edit and embed the conversation. Will probably be posting more experiences with it later. Find it at:

Thanks for dropping by! As a curriculum specialist and consultant for ESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, I get the opportunity to chat all day long about social studies and technology. Feel free to poke around!

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